Elona, a Canadian middle school special education teacher and author of Teachers At Risk, writes today about the inequity of excluding special education students from activities designated for gifted students.I’d like to think these things happen only in Canada but they don’t. I’ve written before about how technology tools like movie making are often saved only for those students whom the teacher believes are “gifted” when in fact the lower students are the ones who need additional and varied activities in order to “get it.”
While I agree with Elementary Educator when he points out that false praise hurts students rather than helps them. However, I do think that every student has some talent that teachers can find and recognize. The student who can’t do “anything” really can’t do anything that we typically do in the classroom but may be able to pick up a musical instrument, edit a short film, or act out a story with a certain flare if only given the opportunity. We have to give students opportunities to demonstrate ability in different ways and we cannot save those opportunities for students who have been identified as gifted.
We need to challenge all students on whatever level they’re at now to take them to the next level. Gifted students aren’t the only ones who are bored in many of our classrooms.
Mathew,
If we look at Gardner’s multiple intelligence we see that school is really only concerned with whether a kid is word smart and math smart. That’s mostly it because most of the credits a kid needs to graduate fall into those two areas. What about people smarts, or self smarts. Those are important smarts in the real world where we all have to interact with people and know ourselves well enough to make informed decisions based on our strengths and weaknesses. I always feel great when a kid has those two smarts because I know that they have a good chance of doing well in the world and I tell them so.
Very often the student who drives us nuts has talents as a leader we don’t often recognize because of the student’s threat to the power structure of the traditional classroom.